Tesla aims to produce most of the chip technology in-house to avoid supply chain disruptions and trade bottlenecks. AFP
Tesla aims to produce most of the chip technology in-house to avoid supply chain disruptions and trade bottlenecks. AFP
Tesla aims to produce most of the chip technology in-house to avoid supply chain disruptions and trade bottlenecks. AFP
Tesla aims to produce most of the chip technology in-house to avoid supply chain disruptions and trade bottlenecks. AFP

Tesla unveils D1 chip to train AI models and build supercomputer Dojo


Alkesh Sharma
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Electric vehicle maker Tesla unveiled a new computer chip, designed entirely in-house, which will be used in the company’s supercomputer, Dojo.

Unveiled at the company’s online AI Day event on Thursday, the new D1 chip will be used to train artificial intelligence networks in Tesla’s data centres.

The California-based company said it is placing up to 25 D1 chips on to a single training tile and 120 of these tiles will be joined together across various servers. This will make the calculations several times faster than most supercomputers in use today.

“This was entirely designed by the Tesla team internally … all the way from the architecture to the package,” said Ganesh Venkataramanan, senior director of autopilot hardware at Tesla.

“We can do [computations] and data transfers simultaneously … this is a pure machine-learning machine,” said Mr Venkataramanan.

The IBM Q System One quantum computer on display in Las Vegas. Reuters
The IBM Q System One quantum computer on display in Las Vegas. Reuters

Supercomputers are far more powerful than general-purpose computers and are typically used to address the most demanding problems in the world. These include developing models to discover new medicine, fight a pandemic, explore oil and gas reserves, simulate nuclear weapon explosions, forecast weather and research climate issues.

US technology companies such as Microsoft, IBM and Google are competing to develop improved supercomputer technology. Quantum physicists at Abu Dhabi’s Technology Innovation Institute are building the Middle East’s first quantum supercomputer.


Dojo, which is expected to be operational next year, will not only be part of the technology for Tesla’s full self-driving system that offers more enhanced features such as auto-parking and automatic lane changes.

“This is not intended to be just limited to Tesla cars,” the company's billionaire chief executive Elon Musk said.

“Those of you who’ve seen the full self-driving beta can appreciate the rate at which the Tesla neural net is learning to drive. And this is a particular application of AI, but I think there’s more applications down the road that will make sense,” he said.

Mr Musk described Tesla as a company with “deep AI activity in hardware on the inference level and on the training level” at the company’s AI Day event.

“There’s a tremendous amount of work to make it work and that’s why we need talented people to join and solve the problem,” he said.

Tesla said it aims to produce most of the technology in-house to avoid future supply chain disruptions and trade bottlenecks.

Last year, Tesla unveiled a computer chip produced by South Korean technology company Samsung, but this did not shield the company from the Covid-induced chip shortage.

This month, Mr Musk said the company is facing severe supply chain constraints, with the most problematic being sourcing components from Japan’s Renesas and Germany’s Robert Bosch.

In its earning call last month, Tesla said continued supply constraints will have a “strong influence on the rate of delivery growth” for the rest of this year. The company, which delivered a record 201,250 vehicles in the second quarter, said it had to rewrite the vehicle software to support the alternate chips to minimise the impact of global scarcity.

Tesla also aims to launch a humanoid robot prototype next year, Mr Musk said. The Tesla bot will be designed for risky, repetitive and boring tasks.

About 173 centimetres tall, the robots will be programmed to do various monotonous jobs such as assembling car parts, moving components around factories and picking up groceries.

UAE currency: the story behind the money in your pockets
Quick%20facts
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Conflict, drought, famine

Estimates of the number of deaths caused by the famine range from 400,000 to 1 million, according to a document prepared for the UK House of Lords in 2024.
It has been claimed that the policies of the Ethiopian government, which took control after deposing Emperor Haile Selassie in a military-led revolution in 1974, contributed to the scale of the famine.
Dr Miriam Bradley, senior lecturer in humanitarian studies at the University of Manchester, has argued that, by the early 1980s, “several government policies combined to cause, rather than prevent, a famine which lasted from 1983 to 1985. Mengistu’s government imposed Stalinist-model agricultural policies involving forced collectivisation and villagisation [relocation of communities into planned villages].
The West became aware of the catastrophe through a series of BBC News reports by journalist Michael Buerk in October 1984 describing a “biblical famine” and containing graphic images of thousands of people, including children, facing starvation.

Band Aid

Bob Geldof, singer with the Irish rock group The Boomtown Rats, formed Band Aid in response to the horrific images shown in the news broadcasts.
With Midge Ure of the band Ultravox, he wrote the hit charity single Do They Know it’s Christmas in December 1984, featuring a string of high-profile musicians.
Following the single’s success, the idea to stage a rock concert evolved.
Live Aid was a series of simultaneous concerts that took place at Wembley Stadium in London, John F Kennedy Stadium in Philadelphia, the US, and at various other venues across the world.
The combined event was broadcast to an estimated worldwide audience of 1.5 billion.

Sole survivors
  • Cecelia Crocker was on board Northwest Airlines Flight 255 in 1987 when it crashed in Detroit, killing 154 people, including her parents and brother. The plane had hit a light pole on take off
  • George Lamson Jr, from Minnesota, was on a Galaxy Airlines flight that crashed in Reno in 1985, killing 68 people. His entire seat was launched out of the plane
  • Bahia Bakari, then 12, survived when a Yemenia Airways flight crashed near the Comoros in 2009, killing 152. She was found clinging to wreckage after floating in the ocean for 13 hours.
  • Jim Polehinke was the co-pilot and sole survivor of a 2006 Comair flight that crashed in Lexington, Kentucky, killing 49.
Profile

Company: Justmop.com

Date started: December 2015

Founders: Kerem Kuyucu and Cagatay Ozcan

Sector: Technology and home services

Based: Jumeirah Lake Towers, Dubai

Size: 55 employees and 100,000 cleaning requests a month

Funding:  The company’s investors include Collective Spark, Faith Capital Holding, Oak Capital, VentureFriends, and 500 Startups. 

While you're here
Company Profile:

Name: The Protein Bakeshop

Date of start: 2013

Founders: Rashi Chowdhary and Saad Umerani

Based: Dubai

Size, number of employees: 12

Funding/investors:  $400,000 (2018) 

ELIO

Starring: Yonas Kibreab, Zoe Saldana, Brad Garrett

Directors: Madeline Sharafian, Domee Shi, Adrian Molina

Rating: 4/5

UAE currency: the story behind the money in your pockets
Updated: August 22, 2021, 5:24 AM`